Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 24.djvu/12

 4 Southern Historical Society Papers.

III. THE POSITION OF THE UNIVERSITY IN NORTH CAROLINA

IN 1861.

When we come to study the influence of this University on North Carolina itself, it will be seen that that influence was all powerful. The first alumnus to attain the Governor's chair was William Miller in 1814. Between this date and the deposition of Governor Vance in 1866, no less than fourteen out of twenty governors were Univer- sity men Miller, Branch, Burton, Owen, Swain, Spaight, Morehead, Graham, Manly, Winslow, Bragg, Ellis, Clark, and Vance. They filled the chair thirty-eight years out of the fifty-two. The influence of the University was not less paramount in North Carolina at the outbreak of the war in 1861 than it had been in former years. The governor in 1861, John W. Ellis, and his opponent on the Whig ticket in 1860, John Pool, were both alumni. The two Senators in Congress in 1861, Thomas Bragg and Thomas L. Clingman; four of the Representatives in Congress, L. O'B. Branch, Thomas Ruffin, Z. B. Vance, and Warren Winslow, were University men. The speakership of the State Senate, under Warren Winslow, W. W. Avery, Henry T. Clark, Giles Mebane, M. E. Manly, and Tod R. Caldwell, was constantly under the direction of University men between 1854 and 1870. With the exception of a period of fifteen years, this office was continuously in the hands of University men between 1815 and 1870. Thomas Settle was Speaker of the House of Commons in 1858, 1859, and 1863; R. B. Gilliam in 1862; R. S. Donnell in 1864; and with the exception of twenty years they had filled the office continuously since 1812. The members of the Supreme Court of the State, M. E. Manly, W. H. Battle, and R. M. Pearson, were all alumni. Of the judges of the Superior Court in 1861, the University was represented by John L. Bailey, Romulus M. Saunders, James W. Osborne, George Howard, Jr., and Thomas Ruffin, Jr. In the same way four of the solicitors were University men, Elias C. Hines, Thomas Settle, Jr., Robert Strange, and David Coleman, and William A. Jenkins, the Attorney-General (1856-62), made a fifth. All of his predecessors in the office of Attorney-Gen- eral since 1810 had been University men, except those filling the position for a period of fourteen years. Daniel W. Courts, State Treasurer (1852-63), was another alumnus, and so had been his predecessors since 1837, except for two years. Three of the success- ful Breckinridge electors in 1860, John W. Moore, A. M. Scales,